Apodyopsis
by tarysande
Summary: Shepard is distracted. So is Garrus. Awkwardness ensues.


**_Apodyopsis: The act of mentally undressing someone. _**

#

It started innocently enough.

At first, when Shepard couldn't stop staring at Garrus, she told herself it was only natural, since nobody—not even stubborn, smart-ass turians—just _bounced back_ from taking rockets to the sides of their heads. She'd thought she was going to lose him again almost as soon as she'd found him; a little paranoid hyper-vigilance was to be expected. She was just watching out for a member of her team, making sure he was as healthy as he claimed to be. But Dr. Chakwas did good work, the surgery was successful, he stopped making jokes about his face barely holding together, and Shepard let herself believe she'd be allowed to keep his familiar presence at her six after all.

It stood to rights that she could stop staring, then. But… she didn't.

The armor, she told herself. She was still getting used to the new armor. It was so much bulkier than the lighter gear he'd worn when they first met. She found herself cataloguing individual pieces, mentally remarking on what was the same (very little) and what was different (nearly everything). Even without taking into consideration the mess of ruined plate on the right side of his cowl, the armor was fascinating to her. Who, she wondered, had designed the gold symbol he wore on his right arm? What exactly did it mean? Had the added bulk been adopted to foster a more looming silhouette, as much a mental trick as a physical one? Beneath the armor, were his shoulders as broad as she remembered? Was his tapered turian waist as impossibly narrow?

She found herself glad he still wore blue. Brought out the color of his eyes and the shade of his markings—

Shepard blinked and heat rose in her cheeks when she realized she'd somehow gone from _nice armor_ to _nice eyes_ without consciously thinking about it. Mid-firefight was no time to wax poetic, no matter how pretty a blue those eyes were. She shook her head, peering through her scope and taking out a pair of FENRIS mechs with perfectly placed mechanical-dog-head headshots. _Focus, Shepard._

It didn't work. Like floodgates being opened, thinking nice eyes somehow started a completely inappropriate train of thought that only ended when Garrus shouted something about an YMIR mech about to explode and Shepard ducked behind the not-quite-adequate cover of a pile of nearby crates.

When the dust cleared, her scanner was clear and Garrus stood over her, offering a hand to help her up.

_My_, she thought, _what big hands you have. What do they look like under those ever-present gloves, I wonder?_

Long fingers closed around her wrist and half-hauled her back to her feet. She extricated her hand under the pretense of brushing herself off, but mostly because, even gloved, the feel of his hand had set off a string of tiny land mines beneath her skin.

This kind of thing had never happened before she died.

_Yes, Commander Shepard, consummate professional. Killed for the second time because she was daydreaming about what her turian looks like under his armor instead of, you know, killing the things trying to kill her._

"Something wrong, Shepard?" Garrus asked, all genuine concern.

_I'm remembering a very vivid spread from that issue of Fornax I bought on a whim._

"You're," he waved in the vicinity of his own cheeks, even though—damn him—he didn't blush like she did, "uh, pink." He tapped his visor. "And your vitals are a bit abnormal."

_Oh, just wondering how little a gap would be left between my reaching fingers if I tried to wrap them around your waist. Huh. I bet your hands could encircle my waist completely. And then you could hoist me—_

Shepard coughed, scrubbing at her face and only making things worse. The dust on her hands made her eyes water. "Fine. I mean, I'm fine."

_Shit. I am not fine. Abort. Abort. Mission control to Shepard: do not think about Garrus Vakarian's eyes. Or hands. Especially do not wonder about the texture of his—argh._

He tilted his head, his mandibles fluttering in that particular way that spoke of worry he was never insubordinate enough to voice. "You sure? That last one was kind of close. Didn't you hear me? Maybe you should swing by the medbay when we get back. Let the doc take a look. What is it you always say? Better safe than sorry?"

"Mmm," she agreed, ears still ringing, traitorous brain fixated on the strength of Garrus' hands. _I bet he could just—_ "Nothing a cold shower won't cure."

Garrus chuckled, still a little uneasy. "If you say so, Shepard." Had she ever noticed how much she liked his laugh before? It never failed to put a smile on her face. Hell, she was smiling now. Possibly maniacally. And she couldn't seem to make herself stop.

A future of cold showers stretched out before her.

"If you assholes are finished flirting, can we get back to the ship? I'm fucking _covered_ in mech."

Shepard's laugh emerged far too high-pitched. Jack and Garrus both looked at her like they feared for her sanity. Maybe they were right to. "After you," she said, gesturing back the way they'd come.

Which, as it happened, turned out to be the worst kind of tactical error, since she was then forced to make the entire trip to the shuttle staring at Garrus' ass and wondering if that Fornax had been right about other body parts that might, beneath the armor, bring out the color of Garrus' eyes.

#

Shepard was acting _strange_.

At first he blamed that mech explosion; she'd definitely been caught in the blast radius, and whether she'd shrugged it off or not, something about her demeanor had shifted afterward. Her gaze hadn't been as direct. She'd suffered from a stuttering speech impediment. Even her vitals hadn't been quite normal, with both heart rate and body temperature raised a little above her average. He'd even gone so far as to visit Dr. Chakwas on the pretense of having her check on his injury and hinting obliquely that perhaps the commander had hit her head. Everyone knew you didn't mess around with concussions.

A second visit to the good doctor, and slightly less oblique questions, revealed Chakwas had indeed insisted on checking Shepard out, but everything had come back medically sound.

Medically sound didn't explain why, _since_ the mech-exploding incident, Shepard hadn't included him on a ground team, and her frequent visits to the main battery had completely fallen off. Worst of all? He was _absolutely certain_ she'd run away from him the other day. He'd left the battery just in time to see her enter the mess, and he'd called out a greeting she was _definitely_ close enough to hear, but she'd only quickened her pace and walked off in the direction she'd just come from. Holding an empty cup she'd been clearly intending to fill with coffee. By the time he turned the corner, she was gone again.

Finally, after exhausting every other avenue of investigation—no one else seemed to think anything was weird with Shepard and evidently she hadn't taken another brain-addling mech explosion while he'd been stuck in the battery calibrating guns instead of watching her six—he came to the conclusion that it must be something to do with _him. _Maybe she blamed him for not getting that warning out fast enough? Or for taking the shot on the mech when she was still in range? Had he brushed her off too many times when she'd come down to talk to him, because it wasn't his fault her timing was abominable and she always managed to catch him when he had eight different things going—

Still, even if she was angry, her behavior was strange. Mostly because it wasn't like her to _avoid_ chewing him out if she thought he was in the wrong. Hell, she'd taken him to task over the still-warm bodies back when he took the shot that put Dr. Michel in danger. She'd never been anything less than forthright with him. Avoidance was some new variable he didn't have the first idea what to do with.

The console under his hands gave a warning beep, and he realized that, in his distraction, he'd completely thrown off the cannon's firing algorithms. Great. A little fiddling brought everything back in the normal range, though it was going to take days of calibrating to get things where he liked them.

It went against every ingrained turian instinct—_she's your commanding officer. She doesn't owe you explanations, Vakarian, and she doesn't owe you ground time; follow your orders and keep your mouth shut_—but he couldn't let things drag on this way. Not with her. And not when it felt _so damned wrong._

Straightening his shoulders, Garrus left the battery and headed unerringly for the elevator. Gardner called out a greeting. Garrus ignored it, afraid any distraction would steal his resolve. The ride up to Shepard's cabin was interminable. He almost turned back when the doors slid open to reveal the green light on Shepard's door shining cheerily. Three long steps brought him to the panel, and he brought his closed fist down on it before he could either second-guess himself or give her the opportunity to send him away without opening the door.

Her cabin was empty. He glanced around, taking in the unfamiliar sights, trying not to give in to the instinct to treat it like a crime scene. It was enormous, by ship standards, with a bed big enough for three or four regular-sized humans, under a huge window. (Not a choice he'd have made, for more reasons than its structural weakness. He chalked it up to further proof Cerberus was borderline evil.) Her armor was out on a low table in freshly-cleaned and paint-touched-up pieces, so she wasn't on another mission without him. A mess of mods and datapads and model-ship parts covered every spare inch of desk space. A huge fish tank covered one wall, but it was eerily empty. A strange sound _meeped_ at him, and he turned just in time to see a small, caged rodent disappear, and a second door—private bathroom, he realized belatedly—slide open to admit Shepard herself.

He blinked at her appearance, because it, too, was incomprehensibly strange. He was used to seeing her in full hardsuit gear or in the high-necked, long-sleeved uniform that stood in for dress, though in Cerberus colors instead of Alliance blue. She was wearing neither now. She wasn't wearing a uniform at all, not even a less formal one like she'd worn back on the SR-1. Her torso was covered only by a black scrap of tight cloth with very thin straps. She wore short pants that left her legs bare from mid-thigh down, and did nothing to hide the curve of waist to hip. Maybe it wasn't quite as narrow as a turian waist, and maybe the curve wasn't as extreme as a quarian's curve, but Garrus felt his mandibles flutter involuntarily as he realized he could probably encircle Shepard's waist with his hands and have his fingers overlap. Not—not that he _wanted_ to, but—

She was rubbing a towel over her hair. It covered her eyes, and he realized he had about _three seconds_ to run for the door before she—

"_Garrus_?" she choked, her voice much more higher-pitched than usual. The towel dropped from her hands to settle around her neck. Her hands fluttered in front of her body, as if she wasn't entirely sure where to put them or what to do with them. She settled for crossing her arms across her chest. Under her chest? Uh. He'd seen the gesture a thousand times, but none of her other clothing had ever highlighted the way her… uh, breasts were propped up by her forearms when she did it. He was suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of Matriarch Benezia. Not that he'd _ever_ have admitted it. Shepard's chest, um, looked nicer. To him, anyway. Not that he knew anything about—well. Hmm.

His gaze stopped at her bare shoulders. He'd seen Jack's skin before, of course—_everyone_ saw Jack's skin—but somehow this was different. Shepard bore no colorful markings, and though he could see the shift of muscles beneath the surface, the skin covering them somehow looked _soft_. Not squishy, as he'd sometimes heard lobbed as an insult. Smooth, though. Lean and smooth and soft, ever so faintly marked by echoes of the same scarring still barely crossing her cheeks.

Paler than her face, her shoulders and arms were spotted with small dark spots. They were tiny. He wondered what possible evolutionary purpose they served. Camouflage? He should research Earth vegetation just to see… And then he clenched his hands into fists behind his back because for some inexplicable reason, he wanted to reach out and _touch _them, and if Shepard's anger-pink cheeks and anger-bright eyes were any indication, that touch would be _highly_ inappropriate and _extremely_ unwelcome.

"What the hell are you—don't you _knock_?" Shepard cocked her hip and planted one fist on it. It was supposed to signify anger. He _knew_ it was supposed to signify anger; he'd never had the gesture directed at him, but he'd definitely seen it in action. Instead, he found himself transfixed by the way the subtle motion exaggerated Shepard's already-substantial waist-to-hip ratio.

"I, uh," he said. "Uh, I—"

Rivulets of water dripped from the ends of her hair, leaving trails across her skin. A bead of moisture trickled down the side of her neck, and he gazed, transfixed, as it slid across the curve of her throat and down the bare skin of her chest before disappearing between the, uh—he jerked his eyes back up to her face. "Did I do something to piss you off?"

Her brow furrowed. "You mean something other than barging uninvited into my cabin and lurking outside my bathroom door?"

He stiffened, bracing himself against the whip-crack attack of her words and trying not to respond in kind. "You've… look, whatever I did or didn't do, I wish you'd tell me. Things have been off since that mech knocked you out. I know I should've waited until you were clear to take the shot, and I know you've got the right to make whatever calls you want as far as the ground teams work, but hell, Shepard, I'm not used to you outright _avoiding_ me. I just want to clear the air."

And then yet another strange thing happened. Her lips parted but no sound came out. Her eyes widened, but not in anger, and her cheeks went an even brighter shade of pink, all the way up to her ears. His eyes dropped just enough to see the pink stain spreading across her chest as well. "I'm not mad," she mumbled. Shepard. Mumbled. Just how thorough had Dr. Chakwas _been_ anyway? Shepard dabbed at her damp neck with the towel, her gaze fixed on her feet. Garrus stared at them. Human feet were even weirder than human hands. So small. All those little toes with their useless little nails. Shepard's were painted red. He guessed it was some kind of human ritual thing. "Just, uh, stupid. And distracted. My problem, Garrus. Not yours. I'll—I'll get over it. Uh. Get it out of my system." She lifted her head and glanced over her shoulder. "Take colder showers." She straightened her shoulders, and he saw her chest rise and fall as she took a deep breath. "Going downside on a smash-and-grab tomorrow, if you want in. Was going to ask Thane, but he keeps stealing my kills. My headshot tally's all shot to hell."

Garrus' mandibles flicked. "You saying he's better than me?"

She smiled, and it felt like the first real smile he'd seen from her since the exploding mech incident. "I'm saying he's used to working alone. Doesn't know my style the way you do. Shepard and Vakarian, right? We, um, we make a good team."

"I don't know, Shepard," he drawled. "If you're letting the drell show you up, maybe it's time to change it to Vakarian and Shepard."

She snapped her towel at him. He didn't even attempt to move out of its way, because he'd never seen her move with so little bulk hiding the flexibility of her lines, and he found himself wondering what it would be like to spar with her. Hand to hand. They didn't seem to do things like that on human ships, though, or he'd have asked. Probably. Or, uh—vivid tie-breaker memories came to mind—maybe not. The towel caught him on the side of the head with a wet thwack. She laughed, already sauntering over to her couch. He gazed surreptitiously at her waist. Again. Her hardsuit and the boxy cut of her Cerberus dress jacket did that waist no favors. Not that he'd ever—she was human. And his commanding officer. And his _human commanding officer. _And damn, this was _not_ a train of thought he was meant to be riding. Now. Or ever.

"I should go," he said, his subharmonics half-strangled. He hoped she couldn't tell. Her lips were doing that strange smirking smiling thing he could never quite get a read on. "The, uh, firing algorithms, I—"

"Color me surprised." She crossed her arms again. Which, uh, rearranged a whole bunch of parts of her anatomy in very distracting ways. _Again._

He didn't know why _she_ was taking cold showers, but he was starting to think it was maybe time he started doing the same.


End file.
